We’re into the second week of August now and the new launches are coming thick and fast. Today’s releases cover quite a range, from running a totalitarian state and then fighting in its wars yourself to taking on enormous Titans, building ridiculous pinball combos, and sending tiny miners into a cursed Hole. There’s also a taskbar RPG that keeps playing while you get on with your actual work, plus a couple of free-to-play releases and a new demo.
Here’s everything launching today that’s caught our eye.
Featured Release
Pax Autocratica
Total control, total consequences. You get an entire nation to run, but when things go wrong, you’re expected to pick up a weapon and fight for it yourself.
Pax Autocratica is a totalitarian colony sim and FPS roguelite hybrid from developer Multiverse, launching into Steam Early Access today. The game splits its time between managing your state and heading into battle yourself.
Back at the colony, you’ll assign citizens to jobs such as mining, research, and weapons manufacturing. You can rule through fear, propaganda, and surveillance, or try to keep people on your side with comfort and prosperity. Your decisions have a lasting effect on the people living under your rule, with citizens developing their own levels of loyalty, fear, friendships, rivalries, and gratitude. Push things too far and that dissatisfaction can eventually turn into an outright revolt.
When it’s time to fight, you’ll take control of your own battalion in first-person battles. What starts with small skirmishes can eventually turn into much larger fights involving infantry, tanks, and mechs, with bullet-hell style projectile patterns thrown into the mix. Weapon Cores and Combination Cores found during expeditions let you change up your loadout and create new synergies as you play, while captured enemies can be brought back to your colony and converted through fear or indoctrination.
The game is single-player at launch, although Multiverse plans to add co-op during Early Access.
What Else is Releasing Today?
Pax Autocratica isn’t the only game launching today. There are plenty of other interesting releases landing on Steam, from tactical battles against enormous gods to a very strange take on pinball.
The Severed Gods
In The Severed Gods, death is part of the progression. Every time you fall, you return for another attempt with the chance to become stronger.
Developed by Topebox, this turn-based tactical RPG combines roguelite reincarnation with battles fought across three different levels of height. Your main targets are colossal Titans, and you’ll need to carefully time your attacks while gradually breaking them apart using the game’s Sever system, which lets you target and remove individual limbs.
Relics, skills, and companions carry over between lives, giving you more tools with every attempt. Your ultimate goal is to become strong enough to take down the dragon Umbra for good. The game is launching into Early Access today and it looks like a fun game to get stuck into.
Cult of PiN
If you remember spending far too much time playing Windows 3D Pinball, Cult of PiN takes that basic idea and throws it into a much stranger direction.
This roguelike pinball game from solo developer KennyMakesGames combines physics-based pinball with the build crafting you’d expect from games such as Balatro and Peglin. You’ll bounce around hand-drawn 3D tables, smashing bumpers and building combos while picking from more than 130 Glyphs and Blessings.
There are also eight different balls to choose from, each with its own passive abilities. The aim is to build the best setup you can, chase increasingly high scores, and see how far you can climb the leaderboard.
Hole is Mine
The Hole needs cleaning up, and unfortunately, you’re the one who has to do it. Hole Is Mine is an incremental adventure from Incrementalist, the developer behind Astro Prospector. You’ll head into a cursed abyss to rescue villagers while gradually purifying the mysterious Hole.
Rather than doing all the mining yourself, you can send out your Mini’Ohs to do the work for you. There are hundreds of gear combinations to experiment with across masks, pickaxes, and backpacks, while your village can also be rebuilt and upgraded between expeditions.
The deeper you go, the more resources you’ll collect, giving you even more ways to improve your next run.
Realmbound Frontier
Got 20 minutes to spare? That’s about all Realmbound Frontier needs. Released today by SimProse Studios, this card-based RPG puts you in a world of monsters, magic, and a frankly ridiculous amount of randomisation. You’ll make your way through 15 different realms, choosing where to go as you encounter monsters, treasures, quests, traps, and other events along the way.
There are more than 200 cards to collect and use in battle, each with its own strengths, effects, and sometimes drawbacks. The world itself can also throw in special land effects, while thousands of possible treasures and events mean you’re unlikely to get the same adventure twice.
The whole thing is built around short runs of around 15 to 20 minutes, making Realmbound Frontier an easy one to squeeze in when you don’t have time for a much longer roguelite run. Your best Gold totals are also recorded in the Hall of Champions, giving you something to chase once you’ve got a few adventures under your belt.
Free to Play
Don’t fancy spending anything today? There’s also a couple of great free games worth checking out…
The Black Lily Blooms in Her Eyes
The Black Lily Blooms in Her Eyes is a difficult game to describe without making it sound like three different games stuck together. It’s part visual novel, part strategy RPG, and part roguelike, with turn-based battles, character-driven storytelling, and a mysterious world that isn’t particularly interested in keeping you alive. You’ll build your party, choose your skills, and make decisions along the way that shape your journey.
There’s a dark, unsettling tone running through the whole thing, with the visual novel elements sitting alongside its more traditional RPG mechanics. It’s an unusual combination, but that’s exactly what makes it worth a look. And since it’s free to play, you can find out for yourself without having to spend anything.
TASMON: Taskbar Monsters
What if your computer’s taskbar had its own little RPG running in the background?
That’s essentially the idea behind TASMON: Taskbar Monsters, a free-to-play idle RPG that sits in your desktop taskbar and keeps battling while you get on with whatever else you’re doing.
You’ll collect eggs and loot from 156 different species, evolve and awaken your monsters, and create weapons with unique serial numbers. It’s designed to keep progressing in the background, so you can check in whenever you feel like seeing what your team has been up to.
Demo Launching Today
Alongside full game releases, there’s a demo launching today too. Bagchinko‘s newly released demo gives you a chance to see what it’s all about…
Bagchinko
Being a goblin at the bottom of the office food chain isn’t easy. In Bagchinko, you’ll have to throw your work bag around a pachinko-style board if you want to hit your targets and keep your job.
Developed by WeightedPebble, this roguelike gives you six throws per contract to reach your quota. You can line up your shots, place junk pegs around the board, and change your loadout with different wands, whips, and bows as you go.
There’s also something called the Goblin Flow Vortex, because apparently regular office work wasn’t chaotic enough. Your longer-term goal is to collect second-hand books and work your way towards a permanent position.
The demo gives you a chance to see whether this particular brand of goblin office misery is for you before buying the full game.
So, What Are You Going to Be Playing?
That’s a surprisingly busy Monday for new games. Whether you want to spend the day running a questionable empire, dismantling giant gods, chasing high scores, or sending tiny workers into a cursed hole, there’s no shortage of strange ways to lose a few hours.
With free-to-play games and a demo also in the mix, you don’t even need to open your wallet to find something new. Now comes the difficult part…deciding which one you’re actually going to play first.